Five Practices of Emotionally and Socially Engaged Ecoliteracy
Educators who cultivate the following five practices of socially and emotionally engaged ecoliteracy—for both themselves and their students—have the profound capacity to help create and sustain healthier relationships with other people and the planet. These are, of course, not the only ways to do so. But we believe these practices, described below and illustrated in the stories to follow, offer a strong foundation for becoming ecoliterate. Each can be nurtured in age-appropriate ways for students, ranging from pre-kindergarten through adulthood, and help promote the cognitive and affective abilities central to the integration of emotional, social, and ecological intelligence.
People who are ecoliterate cultivate compassion toward other forms of life. This ability to feel empathy often stems from a deep understanding that humans are part of a broader community that includes all living beings.
At a basic level, all organisms—including humans—need food water, space, and conditions that support dynamic equilibrium to survive. By recognizing the common needs we share with all organisms, we can begin to shift our perspective about who we are relative to other species and life forms. We can move from a view of humans as separate and superior to a more authentic view of humans as members of the natural world. From that perspective, we can expand our empathic concern to consider the quality of life of other life forms, feel genuine concern about their well-being, and act on that concern.
Most young children exhibit care and compassion toward other living beings. This is one of several indicators suggesting that human brains are wired to feel empathy and concern for other living things. Teachers can nurture this capacity to care by creating class lessons that emphasize the important roles that plants and animals play in sustaining the web of life. Empathy also can be developed through direct contact with other living things. Teachers often nurture caring among their students by keeping live plants and animals in the classroom; taking field trips to nature areas, zoos, botanical gardens, and animal rescue centers; and involving students in field projects such as habitat restoration. In Chapter Six of this book, you will read an inspiring example of fourth graders who chose an unlikely endangered species, fell in love with it, and participated in restoring its habitat.
Another way teachers can help develop empathy for other forms of life is by studying indigenous cultures. Most of these cultures share a profound reverence for all living creatures, especially for those that co-exist with them in and around where they live. From early Australian Aboriginal culture to the Gwich'in First Nation in the Arctic Circle, traditional societies have viewed themselves as intimately connected to plants, animals, the land, and the cycles of life. This worldview of interdependence guides daily living, contributing to these societies' ability to survive, frequently in delicate ecosystems, for thousands of years. Chapter Three, “The Heart of the Caribou,” offers a moving example of the relationship between an indigenous community and the living beings with which they share their homeland. The study of indigenous cultures is found throughout academic standards from kindergarten through twelfth grade. By focusing on their relationship with their surroundings, students learn how a society lives when it values other forms of life.
As you read this book, you will notice that the remarkable people portrayed here practice ecoliteracy within the context of their community. They are well aware that emotional and social intelligence flourish through their interconnectedness as they join to focus on issues about which they are passionate.
Communities represent a core pattern of organization for surviving over time. When we turn to nature, we find that healthy communities of living organisms are diverse, have a strong network of relationships, and are resilient. Life in nature does not survive in isolation.
When we consider human communities, we can point to numerous examples of those that strive to be sustainable. Many are ancient indigenous societies, and some are more recent intentional communities located throughout the world. These kinds of communities, which are diverse in their structure and function, frequently offer inspiring models of sustainable living.
One commonly held value among human communities that practice sustainable living is a high regard for the common good. Recognizing that “we are all in this together,” sustainable communities endeavor to create general conditions that are to the advantage of both people and other life. In daily living, this translates to preserving soils, habitats, and water for the long term; practicing energy conservation and prioritizing renewable resources; and keeping waste to a minimum. It also includes creating economic and governmental systems that can sustain the community if an unanticipated disruption occurs, by decentralizing essential goods and services and building in redundancy so if one part of the system fails, other parts are able to keep operating.
Teachers and students participate in a variety of communities at home, at school, and within the wider context of their lives. Many schools strive to build community on campus and sometimes with the broader local populace around them. The notion of sustainability as a community practice, however, embodies some characteristics that fall outside most schools' definitions of themselves as a “community.” For example, by examining how their community provisions itself—from school food to energy use—students can contemplate whether their everyday practices reflect valuing the common good. In Chapter Four, “Beyond Whining,” you will read about high school students in New Orleans who are determined to change the school system so that it models sustainable living.
Other students might follow the approach taken in New Orleans and gather data about the sources of their energy and the amount they use and then survey their peers by asking, “How might we change the way we use energy so that we are more resilient and reduce the negative impacts on people, other living beings, and the planet?” As the New Orleans story shows, these projects can give students the opportunity to begin to build a community that values diverse perspectives, the common good, a strong network of relationships, and resiliency.
Historically—and for some cultures still in existence today—the path between a decision and its consequences was short and visible. If a homesteading family cleared their land of trees, for example, they might soon experience flooding, soil erosion, a lack of shade, and a huge decrease in biodiversity. These days, we often don't see the far-reaching implications of many of our actions—they seem to be invisible. For example, clearing rainforests in South America for planting cash crops such as coffee impacts people and the natural world in numerous ways, as carbon is released into the atmosphere, contributing to the greenhouse effect. Local communities are often displaced, biodiversity is reduced, the soil becomes eroded and depleted of nutrients, and nearby water is polluted due to increased runoff. Yet, as we sip our morning coffee in the United States, the consequences of growing coffee beans in formerly rainforest-covered areas of South America are largely invisible to us. It is too far away for us to fathom.
People who practice engaged ecoliteracy realize that our global economy has created blinders that shield us from experiencing the far-reaching implications of our actions. As we have increased our use of fossil fuels, for instance, it has been difficult (and remains difficult for many people) to believe that we are disrupting something on the magnitude of the Earth's climate. Although some places on the planet are beginning to see evidence of climate change, most of us experience no changes. We may notice unusual weather, but daily weather is not the same as climate disruption over time. In another example, as we develop and use new chemicals, it is unfathomable for most of us to envision the implications for future generations. If we endeavor to develop ways of living that are more life-affirming, we must find ways to make the things that seem invisible visible.
Educators can help make the invisible visible to students by using a number of strategies. As mentioned, phenomenal web-based tools can be used to allow students to visualize that which they cannot see. Google Earth, for example, allows students to “travel” virtually and view the landscape in other regions and countries. Technological applications such as GoodGuide and Fooducate are able to cull from a great deal of research and “package” it in easy-to-understand formats that inform us about the impact of certain household products on our health, the environment, and social justice. Through social networking websites, students can also communicate directly with citizens of distant areas and learn firsthand what the others are experiencing that is invisible to most students. Finally, some students, such as those discussed in Chapter Two, “Taking a Power Trip,” can directly observe places that have been quietly devastated as part of the system that provides most of us with energy.
This practice is twofold: It involves better ways of predicting the potential implications of our behavior while simultaneously creating strategies that compensate for the fact that we cannot foresee all the possible effects of our actions.
Many of the environmental crises that we face today are the unintended consequences of human behavior. For example, we have experienced many unintended but grave consequences of developing the technological ability to access, produce, and use fossil fuels. These new technological capacities have been largely viewed as progress for our society. Only recently has the public become aware of the downsides of our dependency on fossil fuels, such as pollution, suburban sprawl, international conflicts, and climate change.
As a teacher, you can use a couple of noteworthy strategies for teaching students to anticipate unintended consequences. One strategy—the precautionary principle—can help students think about possible unanticipated consequences of everyday human behavior and then shift their thinking and behavior. Several formulations of the precautionary principle exist, but their collective message is the same: When an activity threatens to have a damaging impact on the environment or human health, precautionary actions should be taken regardless of whether a cause-and-effect relationship has been scientifically confirmed. Historically, the people concerned about possible negative impacts of new products, technologies, or practices were expected to prove scientifically that harm would result in order to impose restrictions on their use. Rather than giving the benefit of the doubt to the producers, the precautionary principle (which is now in effect in many countries and in some places in the United States) places the burden of proof on the producers to demonstrate harmlessness and accept responsibility should harm occur.
Throughout this book, you will see unanticipated consequences of not following the precautionary principle. Any one of these stories could serve as a lesson for older students to identify what the outcomes might have been if decision-makers had heeded the precautionary principle and refrained from acting until possible consequences were better understood. After practicing applying the precautionary principle, in retrospect, students can apply it to some of the current decisions facing society today, such as the use of genetically modified crops or electric vehicles or wind farms.
Another strategy for anticipating unintended consequences is to shift from analyzing a problem by reducing it to its isolated components, to adopting a systems thinking perspective that examines the connections and relationships among the various components of the problem. These two approaches to thinking are not either/or choices in how we approach an issue; they represent a continuum of ways to take in and make sense of information. However, modern Western society has long valued reductionist, linear thinking over systems thinking. Consequently, we have often undermined our collective ability to anticipate the unintended consequences of our actions by focusing on the parts at the expense of the whole. Students who can apply systems thinking are usually better at predicting possible consequences of a seemingly small change to one part of the system that can potentially affect the entire system. One easy method for looking at a problem systemically is by mapping it and all of its components and interconnections. It is then easier to grasp the complexity of our decisions and foresee possible implications.
Finally, no matter how adept we are at applying the precautionary principle and systems thinking, we will still encounter unanticipated consequences of our behaviors. Building resiliency (for example, by moving away from mono-crop agriculture or by creating local, less centralized food systems or energy networks) is another important strategy for survival in these circumstances. We can turn to nature and find that the capacity of natural communities to rebound from unintended consequences is vital to survival.
You can recognize emotionally and socially engaged ecoliterate people by how they participate in their everyday lives. Their ways of living reflect their understanding of how nature sustains life. Recognizing that nature has sustained life for eons, they have turned to nature as their teacher and learned several crucial tenets. Three of those tenets are particularly imperative to ecoliterate living.
First of all, ecoliterate people recognize that they are members of a web of diverse relationships within their communities and beyond. They have learned from nature that all living organisms are members of a complex, interconnected web of life and that those members inhabiting a particular place depend upon their interconnectedness for survival. Teachers can foster an understanding of the diverse web of relationships within a location by having students study that location as a system.
Second, ecoliterate people tend to be more aware that systems exist on various levels of scale. In nature, organisms are members of systems nested within other systems, from the micro-level to the macro-level. Each level supports the others to sustain life. When students begin to understand the intricate interplay of relationships that sustain an ecosystem, they can better appreciate the implications for survival that even a small disturbance may have, or the importance of strengthening relationships that help a system respond to disturbances. Students can apply their understanding of nested systems to relationships within their school, community, and other ecosystems.
As you will read in Chapter Seven, “Changing a Food System, One Seed at a Time,” when savvy and motivated young people understand the nested systems in their community, they can influence their community to become more resilient.
Finally, ecoliterate people collectively practice a way of life that fulfills the needs of the present generation while simultaneously supporting nature's inherent ability to sustain life into the future. They have learned from nature that members of a healthy ecosystem do not abuse the resources they need in order to survive. They have also learned from nature to take only what they need and to adjust their behavior in times of boom or bust. This requires that students learn to take a long view when making decisions about how to live.
These five core practices inform the approach to pedagogy described in Section Two of this book. They integrate emotional, social, and ecological intelligence and, when practiced together, manifest a whole that is much more than the sum of its parts.